Old Man Algernon
Sometime during these two Covid-stricken years behind us I made my first forays into the work of Algernon Blackwood, an author of whose fame I had been aware for a long time without getting around to actually reading him. One of the first tales I dug into, since it's one of his most famous, was The Willows, an account of two travellers on a canoe on the Danube who, in the course of their journey, are increasingly spooked, harrassed, beset and attacked by the strangely animate eponymous trees:
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So apparently Tolkien had read Blackwood, and not just The Willows (can somebody pinpoint where in Blackwood the phrase The Crack of Doom comes from?). And as Mithadan has justly complained on Facebook about a lack of new threads in the Books forum (see? social media has its uses;)), maybe we can talk about this. What parallels and differences do you see between Blackwood's and Tolkien's willows? Any other possible resoncances between the two authors that come to your mind? (If you like we can expand this to something like 'Tolkien and the weird/horror fiction of his time'.) |
I am not at all familiar with Blackwood or his work. From his biography, which describes him as a well-known English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist, and a CBE to boot, I see no reason to doubt that Tolkien was familiar with him.
I would point out that the supernatural nature of old and dark forests is well-established in both folk tales and myth. Consider the Black Forest and its reputation, the wood of the suicides in Dante, the role of trees in druidic lore. Characterizing willows as evil may be a bit odd. From some quick research, willows are typically associated with healing. From personal experience, groves of willows are a source of constant motion and sound. The motion and sound are, indeed, relaxing and could easily induce drowsiness. Old Man Willow may be the proverbial "bad seed." |
Hi Mith, thanks for chipping in! :) Yes, why willows? Their constant motion and sound, which you mention, may be especially likely to suggest animacy. Also they grow naturally near water, and in both cases the willowy weirdness is centred around a river - the Danube in Blackwood, the Withywindle in Tolkien. Now rivers in themselves may be liminal bodies (there's always a hither shore and a thither shore), but in neither case does the river itself seem to play a specially active part.
The big difference I see is that in Blackwood, the willows are acting not on their own behalf, but as conduits for some extramundane supernatural power, whereas Old Man Willow seems very much his own tree and, for all his uncanny activity, deeply rooted in natural reality; which, I suppose, tells us a great deal abiut the difference in how the two authors viewed nature. |
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Tolkien, of course, loved the thought of marching trees; however, in letter 163 to W.H. Auden, Tolkien remarked about his "bitter disappointment and disgust" as a schoolboy watching Macbeth, and the "shabby" manner in which Shakespeare treated the "coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill.'" One could say Tolkien righted the wrong...and made an ent of it. |
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